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The cross-fertilisation workshop held in Ostuni (Alto Salento, Italy) in June 2021 (between the Alto Salento case study and the Ardèche one, bringing together some 25 local actors) led to considering future collaborations between the 2 ATTER territories and their actors. After Patrizia Pugliese’s and Marie-Reine Bteich’s (CIHEAM Bari) recent secondment in Ardèche, an encounter took place in Ostuni  on the 17th of May. It brought together the two Leader Action Groups (LAG) that are also ATTER members: Parc Naturel Régional Monts d’Ardèche (PNRMA) and Alto Salento LAG.

The PNRMA was represented by Florence Dodet, also a member of Ardèche Cube LAG. On the Alto Salento side, Vincenzo Iaia, Gianfranco Ciola and Ilaria Oliva were present. An Italian researcher from CIHEAM-Bari, Patrizia Pugliese, and one from France’s INRAE, Claire Lamine, also joined in. The encounter allowed discussing the trajectories of the two Leader programs and their respective priorities, action programmes and governance modes.

In both cases, the Leader programme was seen as having a key role in the territorial sustainability transition. This, both through the support to local farmers and the marketing of local products (such as chestnut and goats’ cheese, in Ardèche; olive oil and local varieties of tomato in Alto Salento), and through collective actions linked to the dynamism of rural zones and sustainable tourism beyond the high season.

Looking closer at the two Leader initiatives, an interesting area of convergence – and of specific relevance for ATTER’s wider discussions – is the recent concern for the inclusion of youth both in the action plans and in the governance of the two programs. In Ardèche, the LAG has put in place favourable conditions and a staged pathway to boost and support youth direct engagement in local decision-making processes. Youngsters are encouraged to observe and analyse the local context and its challenges as well as to take direct responsibility in designing and managing Leader procedures like the management of a specific budget and the establishment of a committee for the drafting of calls for projects and for the evaluation and selection of proposals. A learning-by-doing process designed to foster youth’s direct participation in territorial dynamics and make them want to stay, live and work in the territory, also represented a good occasion to express youth’s interests in initiatives supporting agroecological transition. In Alto Salento, social incubators have been set up in three municipalities to support the creation of economic activities, and young people’s entrepreneurial projects benefit from a higher support to compensate for limited experience and capacities. However, in both cases the formal rigidity of the financing frame makes such reorientations difficult.

In the recent period, new stakes have emerged in both territories. These are linked to the renewed interest in rural territories after the Covid crises (countryside working places, second housing, relocalisation of food provisioning etc.), with a key issue of territorial balance, so that remote areas are not only bucolic leisure areas for the far and near urban residents. This had led to the emergence of innovative places and organisations such as the French Tiers Lieux, as well to specific initiatives for borgate rurali or centres bourgs (villages’ centres).

The discussions also allowed the Italian and French participants to better understand the effects of the nature of the organisation in charge of Leader programs in terms of thematic orientations as well as types of funded projects: a group of public and private partners representing local socio-economic interests in the Italian case, a Natural Regional Park with a much larger team and programme in the French one. In Ardèche, the program is very much in line with the Parc’s missions, and public institutions and civil society organisations carry out the majority of funded actions. In Alto Salento, the programme is chiefly defined by private local economic actors, and actions carried out by entrepreneurs are much more present.

In terms of ATTER exchange processes, a key learning outcome of this experience is the importance of the temporal sequence of exchanges: this second encounter between the two territories’ actors was all the richer that colleagues from both territories had already carried out secondments and got to know several experiences and actors and, even more important, got a “sensible” knowledge and experience of the “other” territory. In the coming year, this cross-fertilisation dynamic should bring some actors from the LAG Alto Salento to meet local actors in Ardèche.

This encounter will be the basis for different co-authored articles for the respective LAG/Park websites as well as for a practitioners’ journal and, based on the shared fieldwork carried out through the secondments of INRAE, CIHEAM-Bari and PNRMA, a future collective article in a scientific journal, contributing to the debates about the role of Leader programs in territorial transitions.